5 ms·
Ask HN: What’s your favorite developer tool of all time and why?
It can be anything - CLI tools, editors, IDEs, build tools, linters, fuzzers, sanitizers, debuggers, SCM tools, DevOps tools, testing tools, SaaS products (Stripe, Datadog), why even software libraries is fair game.
- auslegung 7y agoPen and paper, or whiteboard. It's very important and valuable to think with ink, to see it expressed. Chrome dev tools because debugging in any language I'm familiar with (other than Elm) is a pain but dev tools makes it palatable. Terraform because infrastructure as code is soooo much better than clicking buttons in some half-baked UI. QuickCheck, which is a property-based testing tool for Haskell. Property-based testing is great, if you're unfamiliar you should check it out.
- bubba1236 7y agovscode is great
- kmarc 7y agoThe ALE [1] project. Not only for it's being a vim plugin, but because they have a pretty comprehensive list [2] of linters per programming language / tools; If I have to edit some ruby / terraform / go code tomorrow, which I never did before, I don't need to do much research ALE takes care of it and helps me learn better the best practices. [1]: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale [2]: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/blob/master/supported-tools.md https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/blob/master/supported-...
- caymanjim 7y agoVim. Operating systems (Linux) aside, it's the only tool I've been using for nearly three decades, and I still use it more today than any other piece of software short of a terminal. At its core, it's the same as it was 25 years ago.
- simonpickup 7y agoAbsolutely! Nothing faster
- Mynewrandomu 7y agoCame here to say this. If you know enough vim it is an incredible tool.
- antipaul 7y agomacOS and Emacs. I only use one of them as an OS though ;)
- Nextgrid 7y agoSublime Text for initially allowing me to get into programming (with zero experience, code looks scary; it's even more scary without syntax highlighting) and then PyCharm/IntelliJ for improving my productivity on large projects (wish I would've started using it sooner).
- fjp 7y agoPycharm really is an incredible tool nothing can match its refactoring and debugging capabilities for Python
- rvz 7y agomacOS and Xcode because it pays all of my bills and makes me the most money.
- chrisbennet 7y agoAs a Windows developer, I love Visual Studio.
- probinso 7y agowhiteboard
- jakobegger 7y agoGitUp because it makes rewriting git commits really easy! It's a graphical tool that's not just a wrapper around the CLI tools. It's incredibly powerful yet comes with all the amenities of a GUI tool (pressed wrong key by accident? Just undo with cmd-Z). It's the only graphical Git tool were I really feel in control.
- farseer 7y agoVisual Studios
- randelramirez 7y agoVisual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Because I mainly work on the .NET Stack with things like ASP.NET(MVC, Razor Pages, Blazor) and Xamarin. I use VS Code mainly when I'm doing Web Development stuff like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
- randelramirez 7y agoNotepad++ for quick editing of config files
- rptr_87 7y agoEclipse.... From days of symbian carbide, CDT and Android debugging I always used and loved Eclipse. I always loved its interface and gazillion plugins and tools built around it.
- MH15 7y agoSublime Text was MAGICAL for me as a teen learning to code for the first time. It ran so fast on computers that couldn't practically run Visual Studio. Most of my introduction to programming happened through this text editor. I don't use Sublime much anymore but it was a huge influence on my development as a programmer.